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Aboc Zed
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Lifetime pageviews are only 280. I must be the only one who ever reads this. This is the fate of many. I am not bothered much but other bloggers may be feeling really frustrated when nobody or only a handful of people read what they have to say. Continue reading
Posted Feb 27, 2017 at DH daily quote and more
The more I read the less I want to share anything with anybody - people simply cannot cooperate. Sad but true: there will be no organized reaction to the predicament humanity is in. I am glad I will be dead before the real fun begins. Continue reading
Posted Jul 22, 2015 at DH daily quote and more
No particular theme or anything like the heading :). Just need to post in the void of the internet. Not even a journal entry. All useless. Life is going by and one should spend the precious moments in such a way that he or she never regrets anything he ever... Continue reading
Posted Feb 24, 2015 at DH daily quote and more
George, This post is discussed on the list I read. Here is the question from one of the others on the list. ------ Great paper by Mobus. Thank you Steve. Can anyone help me with this? Mobus says: “.. we have ample examples in nature where systems have reached a level of complexity and declines in energy flow that should have led to collapse, and yet they did not. Rather the system managed to completely reorganize .. Biological evolution provides many examples of this process of reorganization. ..” What are some examples of this? Is he talking about recovery after mass extinctions? Or avoiding mass extinctions, or ecosystems recovering from overshoot by some species? What would the examples be? Thank you. ------
Excellent post. Looking forward to the second installment. One thing Wealth of Nations = Adam Smith.
Years go by and the posting happens so infrequently that it almost does not count. But it is nice to go back and read those posts as we age. And the older we get the less inclined we r to change the world or even to communicate to others. We... Continue reading
Posted Jul 6, 2014 at DH daily quote and more
George, Good luck with your research . It would be great if your efforts will eventually yield results. although I think building intelligent robots is likely not happen before we run out of energy to power them I still like you doing it if only for gaining knowledge. It would be much easier simply to learn how to raise humans in such a way that they communicate to understand and agree instead of disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing doing what Allan Watts called "putting one-down" and reasserting him/herself "one-up". Take Robin's note above. He essentially agreed with the way you present the subject in this post in his own comment to your earlier post "Exploring Consciousness Dangerous Territory? " but here he uses the language that appears to be disagreeing with you. And this is why we will never agree on anything and eventually the whole will shrink bottom-up. I dream about the time when children learn the proper ways of thinking and communicating and will be indoctrinated with the mental model of the eusociality as the necessary condition of ones well being. Unfortunately I know it will only remain a dream during my lifetime and when my children grow up they are likely to dream completely different dreams: the dreams of survival. Again thanks for putting up the posts - they are very enjoyable and informative.
Toggle Commented May 19, 2014 on The Epitome of Consciousness at Question Everything
@BC "What would we do? What kind of world would so-called sapient humans then act to manifest? " i am sure you yourself know that none of us will know the answers to your questions as we are not those people and if and when those people are on the planet then there is no need to ask those questions in other words this is a moot point i do not think anyone on the planet ever will be able to answer those questions simply because evolution of matter never stops: there never was first fish or first human and the end for all and everything is the same: stardust i think we can only chose the time horizon we'd like to consider and i know from experience it is a luxury of being able to consider the horizon that is past immediate future and immediate needs of survival and continuation of so called "good life" and since good life to me is defined "no physical and emotional pain" i see it very difficult to maintain the time horizon other than immediate for any length of time back to reality i wish everybody a good day - where-ever they are and whatever they are doing
Toggle Commented Feb 21, 2014 on Exploring Consciousness at Question Everything
@salih it is a rare occurrence when a lawyer/attorney notices that law is merely codified opinions that have nothing scientific behind them. i think you may be interested in a collection of essays at especially the one that is at
@Frans Can I ask you a question? Have you asked yourself why you think it is important to explain this to your friends? And what makes you want to explain when others clearly do not share in your opinion that it is important? And more importantly: if we assume you succeeded with explaining what next? BTW, great blog you have and the cool video links!
Toggle Commented Jan 13, 2014 on Peak Complexity? at Question Everything
Why cannot we think about life and society without thinking about losers and winners at the same time? Why when we think about ourselves we need to feel that we are if not winners at least not loosers either? I think this is so because we are the social animals... Continue reading
Posted Dec 26, 2013 at DH daily quote and more
i don't remember if george recommended the book or i heard about it somewhere else but I found "What is Life?: How Chemistry becomes Biology" by Addy Pross a good read as a conceptual overview of issues around transition from inorganic matter to LIFE. amazon link i found this pdf on pre-boitic chemistry and reactions screening interesting as well
Toggle Commented Dec 2, 2013 on The Future of Evolution? at Question Everything
I've been in agreement with George's way of thinking for long, pretty much since I discovered his writings. So nothing to add to the article. My comment is prompted by F.Tnioli spotlight on "hope" for isolated communities of wiser people to survive and be seed for more sapient super-speicies. I concur with F.Tnioli that the hope is faint. In my case it is non-existent. I think we are at such a stage of overshoot and diasporation into all the corners of the planet that isolated communities are simply not possible anymore. At least before serious population attrittion brings about a 90% population reduction. Instead of hope for isolated communities I am looking elsewhere. I am looking into the thin layer of people who understand enough like George and commentators here and other places like Decline of the Empire by Dave Cohen and many other numerous internet platforms. At some point I expect those people to formulate a coherent unification language and the means to form a distinct group somewhere on the planet and work themselves into the power structures of whatever society they find themselves be part of. I am not talking about coup d'etat but _evolution_ into government and transforming it from government out of ignorance (ignorant voters voting ignorant representatives that do not know what needs to be done) into government as a science laboratory. Of course system science will be behind it, operations research will be behind it, the understanding that institutions of family, property, law and so on and so forth will have to be morphed to support this transformation and evolution towards the government by knowledge instead of government by ignorance. I know it is not possible to have such change over the horizon of one person's life-time but I do think the genetic imperative to survive will steer the cultural evolution towards that outcome. I do not think this outcome is predetermined, there is no teleology here. But I do think that transition to sustainability in whatever of human population is left after the bottleneck event is more likely to take this path of continuity of cultural evolution of our institutions rather than follow the path of isolated communities of vastly more sapient subset of population. In the end the result is the same - a super-species, a species of Home that is always thinking , always on lookout for what's around the corner and always capable of acting upon the knowledge it acquired to rebalance itself and its relationship with the rest of the biosphere to keep going over the time afforded to LIFE on this planet, say half a billion years or so.
Elaboration on the reference of Tamara to Gogol links paragraph where "microscope" and "Gogol" come together from In Russian Гоголь словно через микроскоп рассматривает чело-веческие пороки: пассивность, бесхарактерность и убо-гую сентиментальность Манилова, невежество и ме-лочность Коробочки, мракобесие, грубость и глупость Собакевича, безалаберность и хвастовство Ноздрева, чудовищную скупость и душевную деградацию Плюш-кина, хищническую цепкость, аферизм и авантюризм Чичикова. Google Translate: Gogol as if through a microscope examines human vices vecheskie: passivity, lack of character, and slaughter-guyu Manilow sentimentality, ignorance and less lochnost boxes, bigotry, rudeness and stupidity Sobakevich disorder and boasting Nozdryov, monstrous avarice and spiritual degradation Plush-kin predatory tenacity , aferizm and adventurism Chichikov.
Toggle Commented Oct 22, 2013 on Knowers/Thinkers at Question Everything
Finished reading yesterday. Disappointed again. But at least it was easy to read. Got it because was mentioned on two of the blogs I check daily. Why disappointed? The book starts with Gauguin' s famous work on which he wrote : Where do we come from? What Are We? and... Continue reading
Posted Aug 5, 2013 at DH daily quote and more
I am mid way in my life (I hope it is mid way but who knows?!) and I started to get this feeling of life being incredibly short and quickly disappearing. Time is running out. When we gone very few things remain of us. Our children and the loved ones... Continue reading
Posted Jul 5, 2013 at DH daily quote and more
Bruce, Nobody argues your narrative for the present and near future. Of course there is no choice in electoral process and of course the top of the hierarchical human organism-whole is shielded from the vagaries of life more than the bottom of the pile. Nobody argues that. All of what you say is perfectly natural and is the reflection of the thus-far biological, intellectual, cultural and what not evolution of the genus homo. But what we all here try to discuss is not where we are now or in next 10 or 50 or even 100 years. I should be more precise and say "genus homo is" because we know where we all will be in 100 years - dead. :) The genus homo will continue to evolve. And there is a certain trajectory to that evolution. From less sapience to more sapience. If you declare the top to be sapient then your definition of sapience is something different from the one we discuss here. Because sapience would go hand in hand with sustainability or least impact on the resource/environment for the human organism-whole. Sapience would husband the resource/environment and use its tinkering or non-tinkering with evolutionary process in such a way as to move towards best optimizing continuous existence of organism-whole over EVOLUTIONARY long horizon. You yourself mentioned that top 0.01% look for self-preservation and preservation of their children. And that is not sapience. Sapience would look for best optimizing the organism-whole well-being and the well-being of individuals would come into play only as the element of and the result of that optimization task for organism-whole, not the other way around. We are not there yet. Our brains form over the intellectual and cultural milieu that is NOT sapient and even if some of us may have more pronounced inclinations to sapience or understand sapience more than others NOBODY can say he/she is truly sapient or declare others to be so simply because that would betray wishful thinking. Our institutions have to evolve sapience and our brains would have to evolve in tandem with our institutions. The momentum of our non-sapient human condition is such in magnitude that it would take not one generation of EXPLICIT experimentation with socio-economic system to put it onto the path towards sapient self-organization. You are trying to say that the top is ENGINEERING the sapient institutions and will "pull the plug" when they are ready. Sapient institutions cannot be engineered. They need to evolve. Together with evolution of our brains. Yes it is already happening as we speak but I doubt it is happening among top 0.01%. Sitting atop of non-sapient pecking order pyramid and not doing anything to slow down the momentum of the evolution out of ignorance is not sapient. Engineering new world order (even if it was possible in principle) is not sapient either.
Bruce, We know everything what you just said. We are not delusional. Yet they are not sapient. they may cull the 99% of the population but if they do not address the fundamental problems with capitalism and democracy the whole wil be in overshoot very quickly. Then cull again. Then overshoot. Then cull again. the cycly of overshoot and cull is not sapient. And I do not see them understanding what needs to be done about capitalism and democracy to make it sustainable. Even if they were to understand that it cannot be implemented with their primitive methods or their so called "wealth". So the history will repeat itself. And that is not sapient. That is our point. Not the fact that we will die and they will continue - that is a given.
Bruce, If the 0.01% were sapient and therefore truly capable of cooperation in the sapient way and also were at the top of the hierarchical power structure as you describe they would have humanely pulled the plug on the 90%. Why allow further irreversible loss of biodiversity and planet's carrying capacity for genus homo if you can prevent it? The fact that the organism-whole continues on the pass to further ocean acidification, deforestation, human induced climate change and so on and so forth clearly indicates that sapience does not guide genus homo at the moment. I may agree that elements among 0.01% may become more aware of where the whole is heading and why but that would be an exception not the rule. Of course you are right that from the 90% side the emergence of sapience within 0.01% would not be observable directly but it would be observable indirectly even only for a very short time immediately proceeding the population reduction events. Like with the nuclear bomb explosion there is a tiny moment of seeing the flash before one turned to dust there will be a moment when observant people from the 90% side will discern the sapient top getting rid of the bottom. It is because the society is interconnected and the thoughts and actions of the top diffuse to the bottom. What we observe now tells me that the top can be called "clever" at best and even that only in the raw and not-intelligent sense of our primitive evolutionary past. Genus homo still has a long way to go to sapient self-organization.
Bruce, Thanks a lot for the link to the "homo socialis" article. There model indeed is very simple and fits the reality much better than the standard models. But the most interesting part is not that they found the proper language to describe the reality but what they suggest their discovery may lead to. They simply talk about "stimulating a huge and exciting field of research". Where is the understanding of a bigger picture? Where is _acting_ as one of the "homo socialis"? We are still in the age when there is no group that actually does genuine cooperation. We all stil are conditional cooperators. Some less some more but conditional. Christ, Budda and the rest may have been those who where real instances opf "homo socialis" but the larger environment still promotes conditional cooperation at best. And that is why I say the 0.01% are far away from sapience. the "homo socialis" group needs to emerge. then it needs to survive and rise to power. Then they can implement population reduction humanely and solidify the eusocial and sustainable organization of genus homo and life on the planet in general. We are a still evolutionary long way from that reality but the trajectory points towards that outcome over long enough time horizon.
Bruce, I would not be so sure about "final solution" being deployed. That kind of solution is not trivial and I tend to think you overestimate the level of sapience that is among the top 0.01% and underestimate the complexity of "final solution" and the institutions and structures needed to implement it safely for that 0.01% My logic is simple enough: if they achieved necessary level of sapience and implied cooperation and have built the institutions and mechanisms required to implement it then they would have implemented it long time ago. Because why keep feeding the drone/burden lessers and watch environment go down the drain if you can SAFELY pull the plug on them? The key here is the impossibility to separate building the institutions for "final solution" from people actually constituting the very structures that are to implement it. That is what institutions are. I agree with you that it is likely that sapience may take hold within 0.01% but the key is timing and unpredictability of how the whole conundrum would unravel. We know very well how collapse happens on the local scale but we have no data at all how it will play out on the truly one world all-connected fully staffed planet level. I do think the hierarchical structure will persist and the attrition will happen from the bottom to the top. I think permaculture, nomadic lifestyle, resettlement and direct democracy will not work as they are more wishfull thinking that reflection of the observable dynamics. But I also cannot rule out that the roll back from overshoot in terms of the population reduction would be much deeper than anything any of us can imagine in the scariest nightmare making the second iteration of overshoot-re-balancing playing out in a completely different fashion than the first. I therefore think more along the lines of preserving and passing knowledge over anything as disruptive as the upcoming bottleneck event. Technically the genus homo has 3.5 billion years to keep learning and if knowledge passes thru each bottleneck event I am fairly confident that at some point the sapient organization and true eusociality would emerge as a matter of survival. LIFE never stops learning.
Very very good. Long and with many words but all good. I think "Language and Abstract Thinking" and "Empathy" are one and the same thing or rather are manifestation of the same thing. We call it 'deliberative capability'. Totally agree on discussion on plurisexuality - that is where the whole is heading. The nuclear family will be at some point the thing of the past. The term 'congregational sexuality' is the one our little group uses to refer to this kernel property of hominid-being. Again: very very good piece. The only question remains: how the higher-sapience individuals in the genus homo identify each other and how they form the group that would be viable under default human condition of institutionalized ignorance across such cultural artifact as nation-state? At some point Homo Cogitans (higher sapience emergent species) will have to compete with Homo Sapiens Sapiens for resources. And the sooner that happens the less corruption of the resource/ environment and the larger the final population of homo cogitans. Think what that means in terms of the current socio-economic system and its fate in the long run over evolutionary deep time.
too bad some of the people reading the above will think it is real news i wonder how many media outlets will pick up the story :)
Toggle Commented Apr 1, 2013 on Great News! at Question Everything
@Icarus62 "If we're going to understand the human condition then we can try to sneakily use that to our advantage and encourage more goodness in the world." But how we define "goodness"? No matter what our definition it is likely that it would not consider the so called "goodness of unborn posterity". This will continue for a very very long while simply becuase human condition is self-perpetuating evolution out of ignorance. The human organism-whole continuously gets injections of neo-nate ignorance and because the current organization is not intelligent at all the ignorance is continued on a larger scale with more participants and more noise. There are people who understand human condition but their understanding has no effect on the trajectory of organism-whole. The masses at the bottom do not matter - there always be a hierarchichal structure of slaves and slave-drivers. The leaders on the top are as not-interested and as not-capable of understanding human condition as the average Joe at the bottom. And from my experience of tryinrg to tsalk to those who I think understand human condition - most if not all are jaded,, tired and not interested in doing anything with their understanding. And if they do not do anything with their understanding then it does not matter if they understand or not. Back to "goodness in the world". In theory it can be defined. But like for anything else those definitions will begin with axioms that cannot be proven. And when we have so many groups that have no clue (I myself probably am clueless :) then the axioms that go into those definitions will most likely be either outright contradictory or atr a minimum interpreted differently. To fit the beliefs they acquired before they even knew what the word "belief" means. And this taskes us right back to square one of neo-nate ignorance and everybody talking to everybody making noise. Now back to human condition and "making a living". Havbe a good day everybody!
Martin, Emotions are the automatic responses of the limbic brain. They are short cuts that evolved over many iterations of evolutionary process. Hence inate fear of snakes and spiders. The emotional valence attached to words that denot abstract concepts is is cultural. Since the SCIENCE and scientific method is only recent way of approaching the understanding of human condition it has not had yet much effect on the way language is used by a man on the street. So it is easy to jump to conclusions and build a straw man to fight. And I have made a mistake of using those ambiguos words that mean everything to everybody, like "void". To me "void" is increadibly liberating because it autamaticaly means oneness with any and all lifeforms at all level of organizations. I like to think about individual cells in my body running their own agenda - wondrous and never boring. So to me the "void" is not nihilist but inclusivist way of thinking and communicating.